


skin & bones

by aionimica



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts, Trauma, canonverse, trauma response
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-11 14:13:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19929379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aionimica/pseuds/aionimica
Summary: When the war is over and done, it’s easy to expect a happy ending. But what happens to you when happily ever after doesn’t exist?A post-TROS/ep9 fic





	skin & bones

The first time this happened to you, you brushed it off. Poe gave you a knowing look as you sat silent in the bulkheads on one of those Mon Cal cruisers — you’ve been on so many you can’t remember their names — and clasped your shoulder. 

You’ll never forget that look on his face. It was that same detachedness that you felt, but one aged by an all-too familiarity with it. Even now his words ring in your ears. “It… it won’t get better. Or it will. Depends on how you look at it.”

Finn told you the same. It was after the  _ Supremacy  _ and you both sat there with a dead-end look in your eye. His fingers tangled with Rose’s as she rested. Finn didn’t even look at you. “The other troopers… they train you for this. Or at least tell you what to expect. But it doesn’t really prepare you for it, though, does it?”

You shook your hand and stared at the broken lightsaber in your hands. And locked away that pain in your chest. 

You were a Jedi, and you had a job to do. 

You didn’t understand them then. You weren’t a soldier at the time. You were just Rey, a girl who wanted to go back to Jakku and got swept up in a war. But you should have seen the signs - you should have anticipated it and done something to abate it or at least stem the tide that was growing at the back of your mind.

No one told you that peace could be so destructive. That in the absence of strife the volcano of thoughts would erupt, rushing down to your consciousness with increasing speed. 

_ Close it off. Close it off. _

Your heart races as you try, but no matter what you say to yourself, it still leaks through. It’s not panic - panic you’ve encountered. Panic is clear cut and defined; panic is that fear in the back of your mind that you might fall to your death; that your family would come when you aren’t there to greet them. Panic is familiar to a girl growing up in a desert.

But this? This is where you pull yourself up out of bed, and stand to do your hair, but let your hand fall back down when you look in the mirror. For months you had a goal, a reason to get out of bed. For years it was survival. For the months with the Resistance, it was fulfilling a promise to something greater than you. Leia gave you so much and you saw the start of the war on Starkiller; you saw the turning point on the  _ Supremacy _ — you came back to a battered rebellion that looked at you like you were their savior sent from the stars. 

You had a role, you had a job, you had a duty and you didn’t think about it and it molded to you like a second skin.

But now… 

What was the point?

The war is over. It’s been over for some time. The First Order has surrendered. The peace treaties were signed and ratified weeks ago. 

That’s what you’re telling everyone at least. That’s what the promotional holos say. Tyranny has ended. Possibility for peace has entered the galaxy.

But what does that mean for you?

What does that mean for a girl who doesn’t have a place beyond a scrap heap? A girl born into the face of adversity and never known a time of rest or peace. What does this mean for you?

A Jedi wielded the banner — led the charge in the tides of war. People rallied around the Jedi. And then quietly fell to the side when their necessity — your necessity faded. 

Rey is a face lost in the crowd.

And for a moment you’re alright with that. 

But then in the silence of it all… Your heart doesn’t settle. Your hands shake and there is a part of you that panics for panic’s sake because there is peace in your life when there shouldn’t be. You are a survivor. The point of your life is to survive -- survival is not a choice, it is a fact of life and now that there is nothing to run from and nothing to scavenge for, what do you do now?

“Are you coming?”

You glance up. Finn’s waiting at the corner; you were supposed to go with them out for dinner. One of the few meetings you’ve been able to have outside of a military context in far too long. One of those days where you can get off base and just relax. But the more it lingers, the more the thought of openness makes it worse.

“Actually, I think I'll be a little late.” He gives you a look — one that can only be categorized as unsurprised and concerned — before nodding. He knows, you’re not sure how, but he knows. And he lets you go.

“If you change your mind, call me.”

You nod and feel a smile at the corner of your lips. It’s broken and false and you spin on your heel, desperate to be gone before it breaks into tears.

The winding halls back to your room are a blur. 

You remember walking. You remember walking and fiddling with the fringes of your clothes: something - anything to keep your hands busy, to keep your mind busy so you don’t lose it there and then. If you’re moving, you can outrun it and you’ve been running your entire life.

Because what place is there in peacetime for someone who is too good at adversity?

Your bed swallows you whole as you curl into yourself upon it. It’s too soft and you wish for the hardness of steel. Steel doesn’t lie or hide behind comfort. Steel doesn’t let you rest. That almost makes you cry — that the girl who dreamed of family and comfort in the bowels of an AT-AT would grow up to a woman who missed it. 

Stress runs in your blood and craves release, building on itself, compounding over and over until there’s nothing left inside but release. And the volcano in your mind is all to pleased to erupt.

_ I have no place, I have no place, I have no place — _

Lies. You know they’re lies. That doesn’t make them carry any less weight. 

Instead, you’re alone with the weight of your head and the unceasing thoughts that tell you every truth and lie you’ve encountered in your entire life. 

_ Your family left you. _

_ Your parents didn’t want you. _

_ No one wants you. _

_ Luke didn’t want you, he didn’t even give you a chance, just like everyone. _

_ They only use you for your skills and then look what happened to the rest of the Jedi? It’ll happen to you. _

Even though Leia tried to keep the worst of the gossip bait away, it was impossible to eliminate it completely. You’ve seen enough of the headlines “JEDI RESURRECTED: DOES THE GALAXY NEED SAVIORS AGAIN?” or even better “FAILED MASTER OF THE JEDI KILLER TRAINED NEW GENERATION: WILL HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF?”

That last one included a picture of you on one of the last days of the war, your face smeared with grime and a hardened, fierce look in your eye. At the time that day was one of your strongest hours

Seeing it now made you want to run. 

_ You’re nothing.  _

_ You’re nothing.  _

_ You’ve always been nothing. _

_ You offer nothing.  _

“You need to stop.”

It’s a quiet voice. Steady. 

He’s in the doorway.

Not that it matters. “That one’s your fault,” you manage to spit out. 

He doesn’t flinch. It would make you feel better if he did.

Instead he stands there as you lie curled up in your sheets. “I know,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

Sometimes you wonder why you even bother talking. Ever since he defected, your bond never quite seems to sleep. There are little thoughts that slip through and that take you a moment to categorize if they’re yours of Ben’s. It’s harder when you’re this close — maybe that’s why he’s been doing recon work on the other side of the planet. 

_ He doesn’t want you either. _

You can hear the sharp rebuttals in his mind, acutely aware of your projections. Despite doing your best to keep quiet, you were screaming out to him.

“Do you want to talk?” His dark eyes meet yours. Why does Ben always know what to ask?

The answer was no and yes in every single intensity and shade. 

“What’s the purpose of this now?” 

He looks at you, unblinking as you speak. There’s a way that he stands in the doorway, hunched over to fit that should be hulking, but instead he looks small. He’s lost weight in the aftermath, you notice. His cheeks look gaunt and there is a weariness to his eye.

“What now? What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to be? I can’t be me, because no one wants me.” You take a rattling breath, attempting to steady yourself but the words keep coming. “No one wants Rey, the orphan from Jakku. No, they want Rey, the Jedi but even then they don’t want that! They want a warrior - they want someone they can stand behind and place on a pedestal and follow into battle and mourn when she falls. They don't want me now, not after it’s all over. 

“And you know what’s the worst thing about that?”

Your hands are crackling, the Force pulling itself beneath you. He feels it too, but he doesn’t run. He walks over; his weight settles down on the bed next to you.

“I don’t even know if I would want me either! Why would I want me? Why would I want someone who doesn’t know what the fuck to do in peacetime. Who doesn’t know how to act when someone wants to shake your hand and asks what you’re going to do next? Why would I want to be with someone who didn’t know how to simply be? Who was so fucking broken that some days she wishes she could run off and find another war or some other form of suffering just to feel normal again?”

He’s there and he’s holding your hands. Your arms hurt and when you look down through the tears, you see the scratch marks. If you scratch hard enough, maybe you can shed this skin and everything will be alright. 

“Why do I want to go back to how things were?” you ask through tears as the sobs you were holding back finally break through. 

He holds you while your tears stain his shirt. He’s warm and there and comforting and his mind whispers sweet nothings through the chaos. 

“I wish I knew,” Ben says at last; his voice cracks and his damn breaks as your racing mind is joined by his own.

_ You don’t belong here, you don’t belong anywhere, Snoke was right: there is no place for you in this galaxy, everyone hates you, you deserve none of this, you deserve to die, you should die, you should — _

He raises your hand to his scar and holds it there. He shudders under your touch. “If I knew, I’d know why I ruined so much of my life. I’d know why I ran away, why I ran to Snoke and stayed there; why I stayed even when you asked me to leave.

“But so much of our life allowed us not to feel. To push it away, to focus on life and springboard off that stress. That was normal and we relished in it. Stress reminded us that we were alive when so many days that shouldn’t have happened. It let us feel when we pushed so much of it all away. The Force was our escape,” he muses as he runs a hand through your tangled hair. “Maybe that’s why it came so easy to us.”

That’s the reason why Ben sought you out. Why he always manages to find you, or vice versa. Because the Force was your hope and your drug and made everything they felt so much  _ more _ in your mind. The absence of it all was a gaping wound that gnawed and necrosed, taking more of you with it every day.

“I don’t want to feel this,” you half-murmur, half-cry into his shoulder. It hurts, Force it hurts, to stare at yourself and see everything that you built yourself around fall flat to the ground. Everything you were, everything you taught yourself to be means nothing now.  _ You have nothing, you have nothing, you have _ — “I can’t feel this for the rest of my life.”

“You won’t.”

_ How do you know that? _

He looks at you with hollow eyes.  _ I don’t,  _ he says through the bond,  _ but I have to hope. Hope that we’re not monsters meant only to blossom in war.  _ “I gave so much of my life to pain and destruction. I… I want to walk a different path, atone for what I’ve done. And I have to hope in that, that I’m not fully broken, or if I am, that I’ll be able to walk upright again.”

He takes your hand and flips it over, tracing the lines of callus on your palm. Lightsaber grips and years of scavenging left them scarred and rough. You curl your hands around his and pull him closer. 

A moment passes.

And then another.

Then another. 

Slowly you feel the tension leave; that pain in your chest abates. You aren’t clinging onto him for dear life. Now you just rest, your muscles loose and your breathing easy. Ben does the same and soon you’re both on your bed, flat on your backs and curled into each other. You bury your face into the crook of his shoulder: he smells of musk and the standard base soap. 

The room is quiet. All you can hear is the sound of your breath and Ben’s echo in his chest. Your mind still races, but the roar of the volcano fades into a babble. A babbling brook. A stream. It’s fast, running down the slope of a great mountain, but you follow it in the hope that you find a steady river along its course. 

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in second person because I wanted an immediacy to the feeling. I wanted to eliminate the distance between the reader and the character and what ended up being an internal monologue to get through the trauma response ended up as an entire POV. I’m very passionate about Rey and Kylo’s mental health and while I have a feeling that it won’t get touched on in the films, I’m glad we have a place here to be able to explore it. Additionally, this fic was kind of therapeutic to write as a part of my own journey. I hope those of you with your own racing minds find a steady stream to walk besides one day. To those of us running.


End file.
